Work begins on $400 million groundwater remediation projects

Two multi-year projects to remediate water from the 226-square-mile San Fernando Valley Groundwater Basin for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power are expected to be completed in mid-2023, reports MyNewsLA, citing the projects’ design-build team.

Stantec is working with Kiewit Corp. on the San Fernando Valley Groundwater Basin (SFB). Stantec is providing process, civil, mechanical, building mechanical, structural, architectural, landscape architectural, and instrumentation and control engineering design services on the projects. Kiewit is providing electrical engineering design services and managing all construction activities.

The SFB covers 226 square miles and is northwest of downtown Los Angeles on the north side of the Hollywood Hills. However, the basin is one of the largest contaminated groundwater areas in the United States. The $400-million projects by Kiewit-Stantec will remove existing industrial contaminants that date back to the 1940s in the SFB.

At the same time, these systems will allow LADWP to treat contaminated groundwater in the vicinity of the North Hollywood Central and Tujunga pump stations, providing up to 200 and 100 cubic feet of water per second, respectively.

Currently, local groundwater provides approximately 11% of the city’s total water supply. It has provided more than 20% of the city’s total supply in some drought years. The city gets most of its water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct—which is Eastern Sierra snowmelt—and from the California Aqueduct, which is water from the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta.

When completed, the projects will treat and deliver up to 75 million gallons of water per day. They are scheduled to be operational by mid-2022.